Google Analytics might be one of the best things that Google "Robin Hooded" to website owners large and small. The analytics package provides incredible functionality and does so for not a dime. That combination of functionality and free have lead to massive market share for Analytics. One estimate last year put Google Analytics at a whopping 80%, while another fell slightly shorter, but still impressive at 74%.
It's been a win-win for Google and for the sites that use the tool to measure their efforts, but a post on the Google Analytics blog today should have some eyebrows raising. The post is short, titled:
More choice for users: browser-based opt-out for Google Analytics on the way.
Maybe Google realizes they need to earn back some "do no evil" sentiment from the population at large. Maybe there's a clever reason why it's best that you not know what happens with the traffic on your site. Maybe, gulp, they really are just doing the right thing. It's hard to tell. The blog post, almost short enough to have been slipped out of Mountain View in a tweet, is served point-blank. In it's entirety:
As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.
So, it's coming soon, and it's pretty clear that the solution would allow people to completely opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.
Depending on how the option is presented and received to the end-user, it could have an unnoticeable effect, or it could eventually impact quite a lot of what you know about your website traffic. 'Free' may just become very expensive in the long run.
Thoughts?